For the second time in as many weeks, the Internet usage in Syria disappeared mysteriously around 10 a.m. local time Wednesday with little to no warning. So, is it another case of the Assad regime trying to disrupt rebel communications or are they really having technical difficulties?
It's still relatively unclear whether the Assad regime broke the Syrian Internet — even if nobody else, even "terrorists," really could — but after a 19-and-a-half-hour near complete shutdown across Syria, service started coming back today, according to multiple analytics firms.
Did the Assad regime just shut down Syrian online access again? For several hours on Thursday — beginning around 3 p.m. Eastern time, or 10 p.m. in Damascus — Internet traffic in the warring country ground to an almost complete halt, just like it did in November when the government blacked out web usage to stymy opposition maneuvers.
Is it a day of unrelenting pain, or 24 hours of pure delight? Are the naysayers missing the point, or are the pranksters to be condemned? We discuss, in another round of Cocktail Crossfire.
Richard Lawson: Manically scrolling through the comments section on National Review Online and Fox Nation and, occasionally, less one-sided outlets has taken up a lot of my idle (and, yes, some working) time this week. Boy do people have a lot of awful things to say about gay marriage!
Slowdowns in Internet traffic in the Middle East and South Asia earlier this week were likely the work of hackers. Hackers in the traditional sense: The Egyptian Navy caught three men hacking into an undersea cable. And it's a bigger problem than it seems.
There are behaviors more shameful on Twitter than simply asking for a couple more followers, please.
After some delays, the movie industry's home-brewed system to fight Internet pirates has finally arrived, and depending on their internet service provider, pirates may not have all that much to fear.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
As if Google's launching a free Wi-Fi network in New York City earlier this month wasn't curious enough, now the search giant is asking the FCC for a license to create an "experimental radio service."
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
Truth and the Internet are strange bedfellows these days, and it's much easier to lie to a large audience online than in person. Has social media made us more gullible? Or was it always this hard to tell distanced falsehood from human reality?
After a relatively fruitless trip to North Korea, Google chief Eric Schmidt and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson sent what they consider a strong message ... by stating the obvious — and, in Schmidt's case, in the form of an empty threat.
The Chinese government on Friday approved regulations that will require all of the country's Internet users to register their names with service providers, but it remains unclear what, exactly, will happen when they go into effect.
Online retailers that for years have championed e-commerce over brick-and-mortar are now opting to build their stores as well. But what does that mean for actual last-minute holiday shopping?
Discovered: Data shows Sandy's online outage toll; what MRIs can tell us about freestyle rap; spiders confuse predators with doppelgänger decoys; thoughtful orangutans.
It's not like the U.S. has to play along with anything since the old treaty, but the new pact does reveal how our government feels about Internet policy now.
The batlle has just begun to heat up, but we can already see which browser has pulled ahead — and which others stand a chance. Here's the early take on Apple, Mozilla, Google, Amazon, and more... with superlatives!
YouTube will cancel at least 60 percent of its current programming for next season, which means 96 of the 160 channels it created over the last year will no longer get funding from the site.
The internet may seem abstract, but it does actually need hardware—hardware that can be damaged by storms like Sandy. As this chart from internet intelligence group Renesys shows, outages happened across the Northeast but were concentrated in New York City.
Stuck inside with only the Internet, the hackers are doing what they can to inform and aid during the storm.
Facebook's new advertising strategies are working for them, with the company's earnings report showing a year-over-year ad revenue growth of 36 percent.
Just as the Internet is approaching GIF saturation, enter Coub, an evolution of the beloved looped animation.
To the outside world last week's creeps-on-Reddit takedown kerfuffle looked like a defense of pornography while the Reddit community framed it as a defense of freedom of speech. However, a recent leaked chat between Redditors and and the site's actual employees suggest that what they fear most is being Reddited themselves.
Reddits creeps are losing their Internet war, with the site banning the subreddit r/CreepSquad, which was already a replacement for the recently blocked r/CreepShots, both places for men to upload photos of unsuspecting women.
New research says that even Facebook, where we use our real names and identities, makes us behave terribly. Is the Internet really making us so awful, or were we, perhaps, just bad to start with, and getting worse? We discuss.
Back 'round the end of June, news broke Salon was selling OG social network The WELL. Things looked bleak, and the Internet was very sad. But this tragic tale has a happy ending after all. Keeping with the site's original spirit, it's been sold to its community.
For more than a deacde, we've been busily populating the World Wide Web with everything new under the sun, but the time has come to start retrieving the old, too.
Last night's Bitcoin heist of $250,000 (or so) worth of the virtual currency shows that this world isn't quite ready for an online alternative to dollar bills because the promises of deregulation aren't worth the safety hazards.
It might sound obvious to anyone who has had run a lemonade stand, but giving away products and services for free -- even on the Internet -- isn't a good business decision.
Like all memes, the animated GIF must constantly evolve or die, and from the looks of the recent GIF innovations, we may have finally reached some sort of limit of the magical, movable image.
In an attempt to make the Internet more available to people in rural areas, Dish is working on expanding its Broadband Satellite services to the whole of America, a source told The Wall Street Journal's William Launder and Shalini Ramachandran, but the cost may still pose a barrier to entry for many.
A recent Wall Street Journal essay has some tips for being a better procrastinator. You probably missed it because you were so busy attending to all of the things you do—and well, we might add!
Following the spate of "Internet is ruining our lives" articles that blame technology for all of our social, mental, and emotional woes, a new narrative has emerged that takes the burden off of our gadgets and puts it on ourselves.
What do we do when Gchat is down? We freak. And then something from the furthest regions of our brain comes forth, something we remember vaguely, what were those 3 little letters? Remember ... AIM?
Twitter is working on a way to give tweeters access to their entire archive, leading us to wonder why anyone would want that in the first place.
The people whose livelihoods and egos depend on the success of Internet-powered gadgets have started disconnecting because of all the detrimental things it may or may not do to our brains that we've read about in various trend stories, of late.
New research is always popping up to enlighten (or terrify, or depress) us about what all of this time spent on the Internet is doing to our brains. What does it do, though, to not only our brains but also to our emotions and characters and personalities?
The State Department's latest counterterrorism effort is apparently an Internet trolling (no, we're not kidding) initiative called Viral Peace. From whom should the government learn to troll?
There are temptations at home that do not exist in traditional work spaces. We asked some hyper-productive friends of The Atlantic Wire who work from home to explain their strategies, and what it is they do all day.
Y.A. author Nina LaCour is making a small-budget movie out of her novel, and the Y.A. community is helping her pay for it.
With this week's Newsweek cover story, we get yet another trend story telling us how bad all our Internet use is for our mental health.
Come Monday somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 computers won't be able to get onto the Interwebs because of some complicated expiration of FBI protection of DNS malware. Don't let that be you.
The news last week The WELL, what many consider the first ever online social network, faces impending doom, has inspired Mike Barthel to write a history of Internet politics over at The Awl, explaining the conflicts modern social networks, like Facebook, face today.
As a reaction to SOPA and other complex legislative efforts to regulate the Internet, online activists have created a Declaration of Internet Freedom, which consists of five very broad principles to keep the Internet free and open. And yet, at fewer than 100 words, the declaration remains frustratingly unclear.
Unlike most Internet destinations, official movie websites are useful for a brief moment in time—making them a perfect capsule of a specific moment in Internet history.
Jen Doll's post on Internet niceness was sure to bring out the haters.
A worrisome trend is underfoot, creeping like a viral fungus. The trend is niceness.
Don't let the cats distract from the eerie and impressive parts of Google's latest research.
Discovered: Antibacterials are making us sick in a different way, thinspiration is scientific, do you e-mail a lot? You might be depressed, and a case for mom blogs.
ICANN, the organization that runs the world's domain names, today released a first round list of applications for new domain name extensions, some of which will become a regular part of our Internet lexicon and some of which will fade away into oblivion.
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